The secret battle for the incrimination of the Scottish queen was now engaged. Mary was aware that Phelippes, Walsingham’s arch agent, had already paid a visit to Chartley to see Paulet, for she had passed some disparaging remarks on his character and his personal appearance; unfortunately she did not realize that the object of Phelippes’ visit had been to set up the exact workings of the snare in which she was to be trapped. Mary was intoxicated by the pleasure of renewed communications. As she wrote her first outward messages, to be handed to the agreeable brewer as she had been directed, she little realized that the treacherous Gifford still lurked in nearby Burton. The method by which Mary believed she contacted the outside world, but in fact merely signalled her private thoughts and schemes directly to her jailer Paulet at Chartley and her enemy Walsingham in London, was as follows:11 Mary’s secretary Nau first took down her letters, according to the queen’s directions and with the help of his own notes made along the way, and then put them into code. Next he would wrap the letters securely in a leather packet and hand them privately to the Cartley brewer. The packet was then slipped through a corked tube in the bung of the cask. The merry brewer – ‘the honest fellow’ as Paulet sarcastically termed him – then drove away, back to Burton. Here he handed the packet to Gifford, and the same evening Gifford would bring the packet secretly back to Chartley and Paulet. If Phelippes was still at Chartley then the message was opened and deciphered on the spot, and the decipher sent forward to Walsingham in London; otherwise the original packet was sent by express riders to London and the deciphering done by Phelippes there. The code set up by the conspirators was not an especially subtle one, involving the use of a mixture of Greek letters, numbers and other symbols for the letters of the alphabet and common words. But even if it had been of a more complicated nature, the deciphering would still not have been a very arduous task: at the opening of her new communications, this particular code had been specially set up for the future between Mary and her correspondents, and passed on to them through the post; Walsingham had thus merely to note it down, and any of its variations, as and when they were established.
Once the deciphering was achieved, the packet was resealed: this was the province of Arthur Gregory, an expert in this individual art. Then Gilbert Gifford rode to London, taking the packet with him, and handed it over to the French embassy, as had been the queen’s original intention. From here it went to Paris, enjoying diplomatic immunity at the ports, and was in Morgan’s hands in mid-March. The journey had thus taken two months, but of course such delays were only too easy to explain, since all parties agreed on the need for extreme secrecy. Nor was the return journey any problem: the process was merely reversed. Mary received her secret post via the brewer as before, in a small packet containing a covering note from Gifford, who had brought it down from London. By the time any message from France was received by Mary, therefore, it had been deciphered, scanned and its contents well and truly noted by Walsingham.
In the spring of 1586 all those concerned in the conspiracy, from whatever angle, felt something like happiness. Mary, in blissful unconsciousness of being betrayed, revelled in the new sap flowing through her rescue schemes. Her secretary Nau even cast the ‘honest fellow’ in the role of Cupid: he had fallen in love with Mary’s former bedfellow Bess Pierrepoint, Bess of Hardwicke’s granddaughter by the marriage of her daughter Frances Cavendish to Sir Henry Pierrepoint. In this case propinquity had not led to love, or if it had, it was on Nau’s side only. Nau’s courtship of Bess led to an unfortunate coolness between Mary and her secretary at this critical moment. Mary’s dearest ‘mignonne’, so charming as a child, had grown up into a proud and rather unattractive young woman, who had inherited some of her grandmother’s trouble-making nature. Despite the approval of Sir Henry, she was disdainful of the match with the voluble secretary, and enlisted Mary in her intrigues to get herself removed to court into Elizabeth’s service.* Nau, however, used the secret pipeline to forward his marriage schemes.
Gifford enjoyed the luxurious god-like superiority of the spy, who can observe the whole battlefield from above. Paulet had the grim satisfaction of watching this woman he had never for a moment trusted reveal herself to be every bit as deceitful as he had suspected. As for the brewer, he was happy enough, since he was being paid twice over, once by Mary, and once by Paulet; furthermore, he thoroughly understood his own value, for what was Paulet’s indignation when, despite the largesse inherent in the situation, the ‘honest fellow’ actually demanded a rise in his wages. Paulet’s whole instinct was against employing so many people, especially people of such gross calibre – ‘I had learned not to trust two where it sufficed to trust one,’ he wrote.12 But even Paulet had to admit that the harsh conditions to which Mary had previously been subjected had led her to leap joyously at any opportunity for correspondence: this, coupled with the need for secrecy which prevented Mary’s side from making any effective double check on their arrangements, combined to make the operation virtually foolproof.†
It was at this point that the original and largely spurious assassination plot of the Giffords, Ballard and Savage was joined by the quite different conspiracy of a number of young English Catholic gentlemen, under the leadership of Anthony Babington. These young men showed a very different attitude to the imprisoned queen of Scots from that of the previous generation: indeed the Babington plot may perhaps be regarded as the first manifestation of that romantic approach to the beleaguered Stuart dynasty which was afterwards to play such a part in British history. After all, Mary Stuart, although always a seductive figure to those who knew her personally, had often been judged extremely harshly by those who did not know her. Her domestic policy in Scotland in the 1560s could by no stretch of the imagination be inscribed as pro-Catholic. The previous Pope, Pius V, in particular, had gone out of his way to show that he disapproved of her marriage to Bothwell – a Protestant ceremony quite apart from its scandalous genesis – and had made it clear that the promulgation of the bull Regnans in Excelsis was intended in origin to safeguard the spiritual welfare of English Catholics, rather than advance the cause of Mary Queen of Scots.
But by 1577 the attitude of the papacy had signally changed: Pope Gregory XIII wrote in August of that year rejoicing that calamity had taught Mary patience, approving of her new virtue, and believing that God would soon requite it with eternal glory.13 As Pope Gregory bid his much-tried daughter to set great store by faith, hope and charity, he struck a very different note from Pope Pius. The attitude of Europe underwent an equal transformation: increasingly in the Catholic literature on the Continent, Mary came to symbolize the martyrdom of the Catholic faith in England. Gone indeed were the days when she had represented the spirit of religious compromise in Scotland. Mary’s Catholic apologists were already at work long before her death. Adam Blackwood, whose dramatically pro-Marian account of her execution, Martyre de la Royne d’Ecosse, was later to become a classic in this field, published De Regibus Apologia in 1581; in this work he defended Mary against the attacks of heretics, who, he maintained, had no right to attack kings at all. Towards the end of the 1570s, lives of Catholic martyrs, brought out in answer to Foxe’s Protestant martyrs, began to include the name of Mary, now considered to be a Catholic martyr in her English (Protestant) prison. Another Marian martryologist, Nicholas Sanders, was also at work in the 1570s, making such fanciful claims as that Mary had deliberately refused the English throne for the sake of the Catholic faith. The Act of Association in 1584 increased the spate. Mary, who had begun life as a beautiful young goddess of the French imagination, had progressed to become a controversial if exotic queen of Scotland, now became identified with the spirit of the Counter-Reformation.14
English minds were not immune to the transformation. By 1586 a whole generation had grown up in England since those far-off days at Kirk o’Field and the shameful, hasty Bothwell marriage: to these young men Mary was a Catholic princess held in an English Protestant tower.15 To them it was Elizabeth
who was the monstrous dragon who held Mary in thrall. These young men who dreamed their dreams were headed by Sir Anthony Babington: the quality of his romantic fancies can be seen in the high-flown language of his letters to the queen of Scots. Babington was a Catholic squire from Dethick, in Derbyshire: now twenty-five, he had been born about the time Mary returned to Scotland; he formed part of that Catholic Midlands society which included families like the Pagets (with whom he was on familiar visiting terms).16 As a boy he had actually been a page to Shrewsbury, when the latter was Queen Mary’s jailer, so that he had had ample opportunity to conceive a quixotic admiration for her. In 1580 he went to France and here became involved with Thomas Morgan, his schemes and his correspondence. Babington was rich – his family had benefited from two marriages to heiresses – and his income came to over £1000 a year in Elizabethan money; this put him in a position to entertain and act the host to his friends in a way which could back up any ideas he wanted to inculcate into them. Perhaps this fact was partly responsible for the influence he exercised over his immediate circle; or else Babington was one of those unlucky people who attract others to them by force of personality without possessing the other sterner attributes of leadership. In any case Babington, while admired and looked up to by his cronies, Chidiock Tichborne, Tilney and the rest, also had a strong streak of the dreamer in his nature, which made him a dangerous plotter with whom to be involved. In addition, when his character came to be tested in the crucible of an Elizabethan interrogation he lacked the necessary strength to withstand the terrible trial of pain.
Yet Babington in early 1586 was above all attractive and gay: Father William Weston gave the contemporary estimate of him – how he had ‘enchanting manners and wit’, he was well-read, well-travelled, good-looking with a quick intelligence, apart from his considerable wealth. Weston also commented on the appeal he exercised over his contemporaries: ‘When in London he drew to himself by the force of his exceptional charm and personality many young Catholic gentlemen of his own standing, gallant, adventurous and daring in defence of the Catholic faith in its day of stress; and ready for any arduous enterprise whatsoever that might advance the common Catholic cause.’17 It was Babington at the head of these men who concocted a second plan to rescue the queen of Scots, to be distinguished from the foreign-based plots of Ballard, the Giffords and Savage. Mendoza, the former Spanish ambassador to London, now in Paris, gave lavish promises of foreign aid; Ballard returned to England, contacted Babington and told him further wild tales of foreign armies on their way. Babington and his companions decided to rescue Mary from her prison, topple Elizabeth from her throne and place Mary on it.
These two separate plots now became entangled with each other, although the two sets of conspirators did not meet until comparatively late in the summer. In the meantime Mary received a mass of old correspondence which had been piling up in the French embassy by the secret brewer’s route, throughout March, April and May. The connection with Babington did not actually arise until Mary’s former emissary, Fontenay, who was Nau’s brother-in-law, wrote to Mary telling her that there was a dispatch for her from Scotland which was now lodged at the house of Sir Anthony Babington in London. At the same moment Mary received from Morgan in Paris a letter which officially approved Babington as a contact.18 Finding Babington independently approved from two sources, Mary now wrote off to Babington herself on 25th June, her first letter in this direction. It was short and to the point: ‘I have understood that upon the ceasing of our intelligence, there were addressed unto you from France and Scotland some packets for me. I pray you, if any have come to your hands, and be yet in place to deliver unto the bearer thereof who will make them be safely conveyed to me.’ This communication was duly put into the beer keg with the somewhat imprecise address of ‘Master Anthony Babington, dwelling most in Derbyshire at a house of his own within two miles of Wingfield, as I doubt not you know for that in this shire he hath many friends and kinsmen.’19
This brief and practical letter was duly read and noted by Walsingham and his agents. It finally reached Babington on 6th July. In reply, spurred on by Ballard and Gifford, he composed an extremely long letter which was neither brief nor practical, and under no circumstances could be considered discreet;* in short, as he himself put it, ‘I writ unto her touching every particular of this plot’.20 The main points of the conspiracy as outlined by Babington were as follows: first an invasion from abroad, of sufficient strength to ensure success; secondly, the invaders to be joined by ‘a strong party at every place’ of English Catholic sympathizers; thirdly, the deliverance of Mary; fourthly, ‘the dispatch of the usurping Competitor’, as Babington put it, ‘for the effectuating of all which it may please your Excellency [Mary] to rely upon my service’. He supplied Mary with details of each stage of the programme; the ‘dispatch of the usurping Competitor’ (Queen Elizabeth), for example, was to be accomplished by six noble gentlemen among Babington’s own friends. Mary was to be extracted from prison by Babington himself with ten of his other friends, at the head of a hundred followers. Babington concluded by hoping that he might assure his conspirators that in the event of the plot proving successful, they would be duly rewarded by Mary’s generosity and bounty.
Mary received this communication on 14th July, by which time of course it had been thoroughly scrutinized by Walsingham, and every detail of the plot was as well-known to the Elizabethan government as to Mary herself. It was Mary’s reaction which was crucial: for although she was already doomed by the terms of the Act of Association, it would have been far more difficult for Walsingham to work up Elizabeth’s odium against her if Mary had shown the Babingtons the cool reception she had displayed to other would-be rescuers in the past. While Mary pondered, she merely acknowledged receipt of Babington’s plan. She asked for Nau’s advice: Nau advised her to leave the letter unanswered as she had done before with similar offers. The English gloatingly attended her reply: ‘We await her very heart in the next,’ commented Phelippes. Finally on 17th July she wrote back to Babington an extremely long, full letter in principle approving his schemes.21 Like the other letters of the secret correspondence, it was composed by Mary in French, the language which still came most naturally to her, but then drafted by Nau and Curle in English, before being translated into cipher and dispatched into the brewer’s pipeline.
Babington in his letter had talked of the killing of Queen Elizabeth. There can be no doubt but that Mary in her reply took this prospect briefly into consideration, weighed it against the prospect of her own liberty, and did not gainsay it. From first to last, in this letter, she quite understandably viewed the matter from her own point of view, but when she wrote, ‘Orders must be given that when their design has been carried out I can be quant et quant got out of here,’ it was clear to the recipients of her letters – as it was to Walsingham – that the design of which she wrote and thus tacitly accepted was that same design of which they too had written, the assassination of the English queen. Throughout her own letter, Mary put all her emphasis on the practical details involved: the conspirators must have horsemen always with them to let her, Mary, know immediately that the deed had been done; otherwise, as no definite date had yet been fixed, Paulet might receive the news first and either transport her to another prison, or fortify the house successfully against her rescue; for the same reason, the conspirators must also take care to stop the progress of the ordinary posts.
Throughout the letter Mary took care to emphasize the terrible consequences to her personally should the plot explode prematurely and fail: the best that could happen to her would be that she would be buried in a dark prison for ever and ever. In this context Mary herself saw foreign help as being not so much desirable as absolutely essential. Not only did she reiterate to Babington that she would only be drawn forth from Chartley by ‘a good army, or in some very good strength’, but it was a point which she also tried to hammer home to Sir Francis Englefield in a letter written on 17th July, the same day as
her fatal communication to Babington:22 ‘Before that they have sufficient promise and assurance, I have wished them plainly not to stir in any wise on this side, for fear they may ruin themselves in vain.’ As she had told Beaton on 18th May, the action of the Spanish king must be regarded as crucial to any actions the English Catholics might take.23
There was no wonder that Phelippes drew a gallows mark on the outside of this letter when he passed it on to Walsingham. Mary had fallen plumb into the trap which had been laid for her. When Walsingham wrote to Leicester in the Netherlands on 9th July – a whole week, incidentally, before Mary actually penned her reply – a highly confidential communication saying that the Scottish queen would shortly be caught out in practices which would condemn her, this was exactly the sort of letter which he had in mind.24 The schemes of Gifford, combined with the restrictions of Paulet, had worked their effect in Mary’s mind. Even so, Walsingham was not totally satisfied with Mary’s reply: he added a forged postscript to the end of the letter also in cipher in which she was made to ask for the names of the six gentlemen who would perform the deed. It would, he felt, represent the climax of her guilt, as well as providing the English government with some additional useful information. This forged postscript provides the final ironic touch to the setting up of the Babington plot by Walsingham and his agents:25 ‘I would be glad to know the names and qualities of the six gentlemen which are to accomplish the designment; for that it may be I shall be able, upon knowledge of the parties, to give you some further advice necessary to be followed therein. … As also from time to time, particularly how you proceed: and as soon as you may, for the same purpose, who be already, and how far every one, privy hereunto.’